Maboko Island
| Geography | |
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| Location | Lake Victoria |
| Length | 1.8 km (1.12 mi) |
| Width | 1 km (0.6 mi) |
| Administration | |
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Kenya
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Maboko Island is a small island lying in the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, in Nyanza Province of western Kenya. It is about 1.8 km long by 1 km wide. It is an important Middle Miocene paleontological site with fossiliferous deposits that were discovered in the 1930s. The age of the deposits is estimated to be 15 to 16 million years, and they are especially important for the abundance of primate fossils they contain.
Miocene fossils in the fluvial deposits of Maboko was first discovered by Archdeacon W.E. Owen in 1933, who started an excavation later that year which yielded a lot of vertebrate fossils. Owen's excavations continued the following two years supervised by Donald Gordon MacInnes. Then few expeditions visited the island before MacInnes returned together with Louis Leakey in 1947. These excavations resulted in a large number of craniodental (crania and teeth) remains of a medium seized cercopithecoid monkey and cranial and postcranial remains of a large anthropoid ape — later to become the holotypes Victoriapithecus macinnesi and Sivapithecus africanus.
Leakey and D.M.S. Watson returned to Maboko in 1949 to collect a large amount of specimen, including an isolated molar later attributed to Limnopithecus legetet. Leakey returned again in 1951 and found fossils of new holotypes: Victoriapithecus leakeyi, Mabokopithecus clarki, and Nyanzapithecus pickfordi.
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